


Hall of Mirrors

by Gray_Days



Series: Refractive Index [1]
Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), DC Animated Universe, Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Earth-3, Elseworlds, Essays, Meta Fic, Nietzsche Blake Derrida et al. officially support foe yay, Other, Trauma Recovery, World's Finest, canon-typical philosophy, untagged platonic relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 08:09:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17915090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Days/pseuds/Gray_Days
Summary: Elsewhere in the multiverse, things go differently.Batman lets a man fall, or doesn’t; the man breaks, or reassembles the pieces into something resembling beauty; the glittering shards reflect fire, or a kind touch, or distort the grim line of a mouth into an endlessly laughing face.A stone dropped into a river causes ripples.Sometimes the water rises, retreats, leaves behind fertile ground and the promise of life. Sometimes it scours everything in its path and leaves only broken rock and crumbling bone.Sometimes, only silence remains.





	Hall of Mirrors

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr July 2017 in response to a question from [frostbite883](http://frostbite883.tumblr.com/):
> 
> _If the Joker had existed in the Earth-3 Universe (and had a different origin in how he became what he is) instead of the Jokester, would the Clown Prince of Crime be a bigger threat than Owlman in that 'verse's Gotham? Also, what happens if Jokester and Batman had coexisted together on Earth-0/New Earth?_
> 
> Jokester characterisation is inevitably influenced by the incomparable [Kieron_oDuibhir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir); Jason characterisation is primarily extrapolated from the film version of Batman: Under the Red Hood. The Batman/Catwoman dynamic has never made sense to me as a fully-realised romantic or sexual relationship, so I don’t write it as one.
> 
>  **Warning** for Owlman’s ableism, Heath Ledger’s Joker, Batman’s emotionally-stunted parenting, and lots and lots of nihilism.
> 
>   
>    
> 

So we have, at base, two options: either Owlman creates the Joker, or he doesn’t. 

Say he creates the Joker — in whatever way, intentional or not. What we have now is a man freed of the fetters of morality and sensibility, and who has the king of Gotham’s night to thank for it. It was Owlman who showed him that life is nothing more than irony and slapstick, that the universe is meaningless and chaotic and cruel and will kill you just because it can, so what can the Joker do but show his appreciation to the fullest extent of his ability? How better to honour that act than to demonstrate how well he’s learned everything Owlman taught him?

Of course he aspires to grandiosity, because along with all the other limits he’s discarded is the idea that he should be careful about how much space he takes up in the world, that he should restrain himself from unduly rocking the boat, that he should ever bother to do anything less than he is capable of. But in no known universe has the Joker ever been as great a threat as Owlman even in a mundane sense. In no known universe has he ever held as effective a stranglehold even over Gotham’s institutions and criminal element alike, much less over the world’s. Oh, he has ambition, certainly, and he has the drive and ruthlessness to fulfil it. But his primary threat is the threat of a terrorist, the threat of unpredictable wide-scale violence to sow panic and mayhem — he’s a bomb or a bullet shot into a crowd, not a knife or a rifle or a guided missile. He lacks _focus._

(Not that Owlman is a threat to _Gotham._ You don’t piss where you eat, and in any case it’s never been terror that he craves — it’s _control_ , and under that a desperate, howling need to matter, to make a difference and exert his influence on the fabric of reality, because safety is a fairy tale and he’s seen what the world does to the helpless and the insignificant. Fear is simply a means to an end, though a satisfying one. Within five years of routing and restructuring Gotham’s Court of Owls to his own ends, the city’s bureaucracy and law enforcement run like a well-oiled machine, even if the machine in question is Moloch.)

That lack of focus is the second reason Owlman dislikes the Joker. Owlman hates, as constantly and naturally as breathing. He despises the overwhelming majority of humanity for their self-deceptive lip service to cultural mores and the expectations of their peers, for the petty ways they sabotage themselves to stay within delineated bounds, for their uninspired ambitions, for the way they fearfully turn their gazes from the dark and put their hopes in false idols of law, love, religion, or a social contract that has any compelling interest in their well-being. None of these things, Owlman knows, will save them, and they will die unremarkable and unremembered deaths without ever having done anything worthy of note. The Joker recognises this, at least. He recognises that there is no human force greater than the will to power — aspiration and achievement, intent and the pursuit of it — but he lacks the necessary willpower to make his intent a reality, and Owlman hates incompetence almost as much as idiocy. The Joker is capable of incredible focus when he wants to be, but inevitably his obsessions lead him astray of his primary goal, to his detriment.

And that’s the first reason Owlman dislikes him: that the Joker recognises his place in the universe, but he doesn’t take it seriously. Owlman’s not opposed to fun. He wouldn’t do what he does if he didn’t enjoy it. He’d still do everything he could to gain so much power he’d never again feel fear, but he doesn’t actually _need_ to go out night after night to extort people and organisations and punish those who didn’t play by the rules. If he wanted to, he could easily fritter the rest of his life away on shameless hedonism, but what he wants is to be the next best thing to God and spit in Death’s face while he’s at it, and the fact that he wants it is what makes it important. But the Joker doesn’t even care about what he wants _enough_ to focus on carrying it through to the end. The Joker is so invested in deceiving himself about his true goals that he’s barely better than the sheep Owlman exploits. He dresses like a clown, but it’s not the makeup and the gags that Owlman hates (aside from the humiliation factor, which he’d gut Joker for the second he dared to aim it in Owlman’s direction). It’s the _farce._

Here’s another fact about Owlman: he creates his own enemies. He was wrought from the darkest depths of adversity, and he came out the other side as the obsessive power-hungry authoritarian that he is today. He can’t help but be curious: what could he do to someone, what confluence of circumstances must there be, in order to break them free of their complacency? What is it that turns someone from sheep to wolf? (And let it not be said that Owlman misunderstands the biological reality of that metaphor: he knows the importance of community when it’s founded on a functional social structure. A man must sleep, and it would be well to have competent allies invested in him waking up again.) What would it take to create a proper _ideological_ opponent — one who can bring a more convincing case against him than the only arguments anyone ever seems to have against those who deviate from expected conduct, which always boil down to either “you’re insane" or “you’re an asshole"? (There is a reason he cuts Batman off so disdainfully on Earth Prime.) Owlman leaves people alive if he thinks they can learn from it. He mutilates them and lets them go, like catch-and-release vermin; or else he kills the idiots and lets their families live, to see whether they fall into line, seek vengeance, or simply fail to justify their continued existence too. So it surprises only those who don’t know either man when the Joker realises that peacocking and pulling on Owlman’s pigtails for attention isn’t having the effect he wants, and he goes to war in earnest.

There are lots of ways this can go, and all of them are disastrous for Gotham, but sooner or later it comes down to only one possible outcome. Owlman is not Batman. In the prime universe, the Joker isn’t wrong when he says that it’s Batman’s reluctance to kill that is responsible for every additional crime he commits, because he will _never stop_ so long as both of them are still alive. In this world, once the Joker is no longer useful or amusing enough to continue earning his stay of execution, the game will always end with two armour-piercing rounds to the chest to put him down and one in the head to finish him off. Owlman has better things to do than indulge someone who isn’t worth his time or effort.

(Years later, when he looks at Luthor’s calculations and realises what he’s seeing, it is the most power Owlman has ever held: the power to travel to any timeline that branched off from the original Earth, and to affect each one limitlessly without concern for the consequences, because every action he takes is negated in the instant of taking it. It is the most powerless he has ever felt.)

* * *

But let’s say that Owlman doesn’t create the Joker. This is Heath Ledger’s Joker instead, who comes out of nowhere and whose terror is as much that of the unknown and inexplicable as that of violence. He does what he does because he is a nihilist down to every cell in his body, in the jargonistic Nietzschean sense of a person oriented toward avolition and the destruction of values rather than toward life and striving, and what he really wants is to force the world to see the same truth he does as he dances in the light of its conflagration. _Look on these Works, ye Hopeful, and despair!_

(And that’s different and the same as Owlman, once Crisis on Two Earths comes to pass. Owlman is an existentialist and a perfect Nietzschean protagonist, not a devotee of entropy. It’s a strangely ubiquitous error. Owlman never does anything without a reason, and he doesn’t decide to destroy all existence just because nothing matters — he does it because control is his only defense against the terror of mortality, the dark night of the soul, and destroying Earth Prime is the only available course of action left whose outcome he alone can determine. It’s the _only_ available course of action that matters. Nietzsche himself saw nihilism as an inevitable result of value systems outliving their ability to fulfill fundamental human needs, and therefore as both a necessary process and one necessary to overcome. When the moment of epiphany dawns and you realise that all you care about is empty of worth or meaning, you return to the core truth that there is no point to being alive except subjective self-definition and the will to power, and you define which new values give you sufficient reason to continue living. It’s not just vitriol that drives Owlman to strip humanity of its comforting illusions — it’s his instinctive dehumanisation of every person who wastes their life so damned _intractably_ on a rickety edifice of social constructs and specious excuses that they may as well be dead, and the profound loneliness that comes of being one of the few people on Earth worth existing. Both Owlman and the Joker are forces of darkness seeking to corrupt the light until it is as dark as they, but at least Owlman has other projects at the same time.)

And let’s say that the Jester does exist in this world, because this Joker arises as a reactionary force and it’s much more interesting than using any other endlessly-recurring enemy when the first time the Joker shows his face is to waltz onto Owlman’s turf and say, _I can help take care of that little problem of yours._

Owlman looks at this warped parody of the clown with his Glasgow smile and his smeared, ugly warpaint, this funhouse mirror image shattered and reassembled by someone without the capacity for care, twitchy and restless and prowling the room with a bottomless hyena hunger, and he says, _Prove it._

The Joker licks his lips, a darting tic of a movement stretched out into something obscene, and he leans forward and says, _See,_ he says, _see, it seems to **me** that what you have is this thorn in your side that you just can’t get rid of, right? You try and you try and go around and around in circles, and this game of cat and mouse that you’ve got here, it just. Never. Ends! No matter what you do. And I think, what I think is, is that it’s because you don’t think about it the right way. Everything in that big beautiful brain of yours is like…exquisite Swiss clockwork, all ticking along with this perfect mechanical precision, a place for everything and everything in its place, et cetera. And your little **problem** is like a grain of sand in the gears and when you try to solve that problem, well, it all just goes to pieces. But me?_ He holds his hands out, open and empty, no weapons, ladies and gentlemen, nothing up his sleeves. _I **know** how nutcases like that **think.**_

 _Because you’re one of them?_ Owlman asks, voice heavy with irony.

 _No,_ the Joker says quietly, all mockery suddenly gone and leaving behind a sucking, deadly emptiness. _No. I’m **not.** But,_ he adds, nearly as an afterthought, _everyone would sure like me to be._

Owlman understands how rationality that tends to skew wide of common convention can seem like madness to the uncreative. He’s also met his share of psychotics insistent on their sanity, so he isn’t laying any bets yet as to which category this joker falls into. He asks, _So what do you get out of this?_

The Joker says, _A partnership._ He says, _What you’re doing with this town, really, it’s inspiring. You’ve got the law running scared, and everyone else is so busy trying to stay afloat and keep from drawing attention from the monsters under the bed that they’d sell their families up the river the very **moment** you dropped a hint! I **admire** that, Owlsie._

A crescent-shaped blade clips a layer of skin from the clown’s ear and buries itself an inch deep in the wall behind him.

The Joker hacks out a skittery laugh, _ha—!_ Touches the cut and dismisses the blood on his fingertips with a glance and an ugly, asymmetric grin. _Message received. But let me get to, heh, to the point: I think we could do great things together, you and I. You with the vision, and me with the…technique. All I need is a go-ahead and your promise. You look like a man who keeps his word. And if you aren’t interested…well! I can promise you’ll never see me again._

(This is, of course, a threat.)

Owlman gives him a long look. _And why should I offer **you** this opportunity?_

 _I’ve heard about you,_ the clown replies, licking his lips in the space between sentences, feral with barely-suppressed anticipation. _Everyone in this town knows to either bring you the Jester alive or not lay a hand on him. And some people might think that’s impractical, or territorial, or maybe just a teensy bit **romantic—**_

There is nothing in the multiverse that can shut this Joker up short of sheer existential shock, yet the sudden glint of metal in Owlman’s hand and the look of _get to the point or lose your fucking tongue_ he levels at him through his expressionless owl mask briefly manages. (Owlman has no time for homophobia or other pointless bigotry simply because that’s a stupid way to run a business, but nor does he have patience for people without the sense necessary to keep their blood inside their bodies, and the Joker is gunning for a Darwin Award at 130mph in a stolen ice cream truck.) Another too-quick grin darts across the Joker’s face, insolent and nervy. _But the **important** thing is, they’re all wrong. I know how that brain of yours works, and it’s not just about calling dibs. It’s about sending a **message.** And if you give me the **honor** of taking out your trash, I can guarantee you that no one in Gotham will ever feel safe around a face like **this —**_ a flutter-fingered gesture encompasses the clown makeup — _again._

So Owlman grants the Joker the courtesy of an audition: destroy the Jester both literally and symbolically, don’t get himself killed in the process, and Owlman will make good on their deal.

A cumulative hour in his presence, and he _loathes_ this Joker more than he ever could the other one. It’s not just that he doesn’t take his goals seriously. Whatever his true aims are, this Joker is meticulous in his preparations, putting them together with the care and attention to detail of a chessmaster or, more precisely, a bombmaker. It’s that _the man himself_ is a bad joke. Everything he says and does — the tics exaggerated to the point of lasciviousness, the mincing mannerisms interspersed with sexual implications and aggressive vulgarity, the intrusions on others’ personal space, the utter disregard for any concept of the truth in his self-contradictory anecdotes — every part of the persona is faked solely to disconcert and disgust, a cheap plastic veneer with nothing behind it except for the occasional momentary flash of sincerity, discordantly subdued in comparison. This Joker pokes adders’ nests and goads murderers without even gaining any particular satisfaction from it. The only real passion he ever shows is for destruction and, at one point, when a periodic check-in culminates in Owlman pinning him to the wall by his throat and calmly threatening to remove an eye if he takes another step out of line, as the Joker wheezes laughter and invites Owlman to observe the suicide-vest pull-ring suddenly looped taut around his thumb.

 _Why so serious?_ the clown reprises breathlessly, feet scrabbling against the wall for purchase, and Owlman is sorely tempted to remove both his thumb _and_ the eye. Since he’s at the wrong angle to do that before the Joker blows them both up, he instead squeezes the carotid pressure points at the sides of the clown’s neck — not pressing on his windpipe enough to alarm him; let him think that Owlman simply has trouble controlling his temper — until a few seconds later his eyes roll back in his head and his body goes slack, hands dropping limply back to his sides. Owlman lets him fall and puts a steel-armoured boot into his ribs as a reminder to keep on-task. (Broken ribs: continuously painful, mildly disabling but not enough to interfere with his work, exploitable for more severe injury, and most importantly less likely to incite betrayal than as-yet unearned mutilation. Owlman doesn’t actually begrudge sensible precautions for self-defense, so long as they remain only a threat.) The vest is confiscated and disposed of, as well as any other weapons Owlman finds on him in a thorough pat-down the clown wisely refrains from commenting on beyond pained laughter and sharp protests of excessive roughness.

From this encounter Owlman concludes, firstly, that the Joker is profoundly sadomasochistic and only slightly less suicidal; secondly, that if he screws up this mission in a way that redounds negatively upon the Court of Owls, Owlman will make him beg for death before granting it; and thirdly, whether or not said mission succeeds, Owlman is going to _fucking murder him._ The man’s very _existence_ is offensive almost beyond Owlman’s capacity to express without spitting.

When the mission goes down a few days later, it predictably goes off the rails, because that’s how this story goes: the Joker never gets to kill the hero. Inevitably, there are casualties — perhaps civilian, perhaps another member or several of the Jester’s circus of rogues, but either way the primary objective goes uncompleted and the Jester lives to grieve the losses and fight another day. Gotham will not easily forget the scars of this confrontation. The Joker, no doubt sensing the retribution headed his way, disappears with the materiel and manpower Owlman lent him. (Not much, nothing too closely associated with him, and nothing he couldn’t replace, though Owlman intends to find out exactly how the man managed to make anyone in _his Court_ turn coat.)

Owlman hunts him down. It’s unexpectedly difficult to find an unkempt madman with livid facial scars, but the Joker doesn’t have half the Jester’s practice at guerrilla tactics and soon enough Owlman tracks him down to his current hideout. He materialises soundlessly from the shadows and slams the Joker’s head into the nearest hard surface, and then the next moment the Joker is bent double clutching at the bloody hole in his stomach — from gun or knife or diamond-tipped talons, it makes no difference, because all that matters is that Owlman isn’t going to let _this_ Joker bleed out before he gets the chance to explain exactly why he deserves it.

The clown is surprisingly dangerous even with a couple of broken ribs and a soon-to-be-fatal gut wound, not to mention whatever other injuries he picked up from his failed character assassination, and he manages to get a knife in through one of the gaps in Owlman’s armour before Owlman breaks his wrist and kicks him to the ground. The brief, guttural cry as Owlman stomps his other hand into the floor for good measure is reasonably gratifying. Joker curls up around his injuries, giggling wetly and unceasingly except when he has to gasp for breath or make noises of pain, and Owlman has to uncurl him like a hedgehog and push him down onto his back so he can lean a knee into his stomach and force the clown to _look_ at him, talons digging parallel red lines into the scars on his cheeks. He keeps giggling as Owlman talks, cackles uncontrollably when Owlman slaps him to make him pay attention, and only stops so he can wheeze, _Hey — hey. Wanna hear a joke?_

 _Is it you?_ Owlman asks with vindictive disinterest.

 _Close,_ giggles the clown. Sustained pressure on the diaphragm is a reliable way to suffocate someone, and with the combination of pain and blood loss and Owlman’s weight on him the Joker is already having trouble focusing on Owlman’s face, eyelids fluttering deliriously. _It’s more about the fact that this place is **littered** with explosives — as are quite a few of your offsite operations — and **you** have just made it impossible for me to type the cancellation code._ He waggles his crushed hand, grin stretching horrifically serene across his face like a gaping wound, teeth stained red with blood. _I set it for three minutes when you showed up — how much time is there left, d'you think?_

Owlman glances at the clock display in the corner of his HUD and knows immediately that it’s not enough to subdue the Joker and drag him out of the building, much less find the detonator on him and disarm it. He gets up off of his victim and runs. Wild, unhinged laughter follows him out as the first explosions make the air behind him shudder with a wave of searing heat, drowning out all other sound.

Afterward, he does not find a body amidst the charred wreckage. It should have been impossible for the Joker to make it out of the building alive, but the fact remains: there is no body to be found, and nor will Owlman or any member of his Court ever find one.

* * *

But now for happier things: where does the Jester come from, in the positive-polarity universe? Was he a victim of one of Gotham’s mob families rather than Owlman, mutilated and left to shoulder the burden of a loved one’s murder because he made the wrong jokes, stepped on the wrong toes, didn’t heed the warning signs when he went too far? Was he a rehabilitation case spurred into turning his life around after an encounter with Batman, a hapless Red Hood who was only ever in it for a lack of other options, who fell from a catwalk due to a sheer confluence of bad luck and whose face as he fell never stops haunting Batman’s waking ruminations? Was he a random bystander who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Did he simply [appear one day with no name and no past](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5225030) and decide, just as in any other circumstance, that there was nothing for it but to fight darkness with light and cruelty with kindness and revel in the fact that life, that the very nature of being alive, brings with it the opportunity for growth and self-determination and connection with those around you? 

(He alludes to his past on occasion, in vague and casual terms, and with little external evidence of any emotion other than the carefree self-deprecation of the Fool. Batman knows more about him than anyone except, perhaps, his family, and knows equally that it doesn’t make much of a difference — to the Jester, yesterday matters because it establishes the conditions for today, and today is what you make of it. Whenever someone asks about his origin — they’re usually bright enough not to mention his disfigurement, though it’s implied in the question — he pirouettes to face them with a bright, inhumanly wide grin: _Why, I make it my life’s work to bring low the powerful and raise up the weak, to spread laughter and joy, and to never set foot in court without everyone knowing I don’t belong there! Whatever else would I have done with myself?)_

The Jester gets along best with Robin, for they are kindred spirits, the brightness and animation to Batman’s swift and silent shadow. And they both get along well with kids, sapping the monster of its aura of menace with fast-flying quips and dazzling acrobatics, reassuring them that they’re safe and turning black-caped vengeance into an unambiguous protector, a tamed beast that punishes the vicious and protects the innocent. J wishes he could calm tears with sweets and big bear hugs but it’s bad policy to train kids to accept candy from strangers, so he sticks to sleight-of-hand magic tricks and lets his audience keep whatever small items he conjures as talismans against the dark.

Dick likes him best of all the Robins, because he grew up in the circus and even if the Jester lacks the training of a professional clown, the attitude is there, the groan-worthy love of a sly dig or a terrible pun and the backbreaking, humiliating dedication to drawing out a smile. You have to _really like_ people to make it as a clown. He has a performer’s love of the spotlight, too, and an easy personal magnetism that eats up attention like a particularly friendly gravity well. In a way that Batman never does, the Jester feels like home.

(Did he come onto the scene before or after Robin started joining Batman on his nightly patrols? Again, it doesn’t make much of a difference — the two men work together when their paths happen to cross, but they both have their own beats and their own cases a lot of the time. Where Batman focuses on street crime and corruption, the Jester is more involved in community service and social support networks and mainly tends to kick bad-guy butt when he knows it’s affecting those with little to lose. Batman finds people jobs and directs them to shelters and makes anonymous donations to those who could use them; J helps repair leaky roofs and gets people in touch with friends who offer affordable daycare or can help you navigate bureaucratic hurdles _pro bono.)_

The Jester gets along surprisingly well with Batman, whose stern demeanour belies a dry, subtle sense of humour that tends toward a faintly British style of cynicism. (When J learns that Alfred the Actual English Butler works for the big bad bat, he is _delighted._ Batman’s batman, _ha!)_ They make an amazingly effective straight man/funny guy duo, Batman setting him up almost undetectably so that J can then knock the punchlines out of the park. (This in itself is ironic, since the Jester is the only one of the pair who’s shown any compelling evidence of being straight by merit of falling in love with and subsequently marrying a beautiful, vivacious woman. Catwoman aside — J’s inclined to think that what’s going on there has more to do with the Dark Knight’s savior complex than heterosexuality per se, since otherwise Batman shows about as much sexual proclivity as a particularly introverted rock. Which is very professional, all told.) 

(The first time the two of them cross paths for more than a minute or two, Batman is staking out a building from one of the Jester’s rooftops when a grating half-whisper a few inches behind his right ear says, _Ooh, what are we going to do tonight, Brain?_

Batman suppresses the instinctive motion toward violence with only a small, barely-visible twitch. He lowers his binoculars for a moment to glance directly into a huge, ghoulish red grin that quickly backs off a few more inches at his expression. Contrary to ordinary laws of perspective, the grin gets bigger. There are little golden jingle bells sewn to the Jester’s cap and the scalloped edges of his collar and tunic, but they apparently lack clappers, which is both sensible and slightly irritating. Turning back to his target, he replies, low-voiced, _The Russian’s started moving in on the drug trade in this area after the sting on Falcone’s crew the other week. I’ve tracked several of their dealers back here._

 _Supplier, huh?_ The Jester perches comfortably on top of a nearby air-conditioning unit, kicking his feet slightly. _So what’s the plan?_

 _I go in,_ Batman says. _You stay out here. I don’t need to be tracking someone else when there could be gunfire._ (Someone he’s unaccustomed to fighting alongside, he means, considering that the whole Robin thing happens at some point.)

J sticks out his tongue, which goes completely unappreciated by the giant man-bat cryptid staring intently across the street. _Boo to you, too. Come on, I do this every night just like you — I can take care of myself. And anyway, these are **my** people. I have just as much right to help them out as you do._

Batman doesn’t move in any way that J can tell, but something in his posture softens — inasmuch as the difference between diamond and corundum, at least — and he tells J the plan. J’s grin stretches nearly to his ears. Twenty minutes later, they move in and pull it off without a hitch. It is _awesome._ And there isn’t even much gunfire, so _there.)_

Jason, now. Jason likes the Jester because even if he doesn’t let the kid put himself in harm’s way like Batman does, he lets him get away with more, and when he wants Jason to do something he’s good at phrasing it so he feels included, important. Meanwhile, J _loves_ the kid even more than he worries about him — for the way he glories in everything he does, glories in the doing of it and the power and freedom to do it, drinking life down like he never thought he’d get to. Jason is sharp-edged in a way Dick only ever was when a case hit too close to home: where Dick is a being of the air, light and swift on his feet and so defiant of gravity that he moves as comfortably in the vertical axis as the horizontal, Jason is fire, feverish and fearless and prickly and hungry for experience, for justice, for affection and validation even as he affects to disdain it. Jason grasps for everything he can hold, stakes a claim on the rare people he lets himself care about, acts on impulse and doesn’t hold back once he’s decided on something. J worries sometimes that he and Jason are _too_ alike, that they both bring out each other’s worst qualities and one day he’ll forget himself and it’ll all end in tears.

 _(Don’t,_ Batman says when J mentions it to him. _You’re the only one he always listens to._ Unspoken: Batman trusts the Jester’s way of handling Jason more than his own. This is the night after J talked the kid down from beating a child trafficker into unconsciousness, so he sees where Bats is coming from, but given that his argument was _yes, he deserves it and worse, yes, if the law doesn’t stop people like him then we have to, that’s why we do what we do and what you’ve done tonight has already saved those kids and others that would have ended up like them, so just hand me that crowbar for now…_ he’s a bit less confident.

J stops pacing and throws up his hands. _That’s my whole point!_

Batman gives him one of his many Looks, which here means that he should stop being foolish, as if that isn’t his very nature. J grumbles to himself and starts pacing again in agitation. The matter goes unresolved.)

As Jason grows older he becomes fiercer, less restrained, and J worries more and more until one day Jason shows up at the door of the abandoned toy factory that J set up as a base of operations, wearing an utterly emotionless expression that means he is inches from exploding.

Disoriented by the sight of a Robin in the middle of the day, J stupidly says the first thing that comes to mind, which is _Shouldn’t you be in school?_

Jason’s expression tightens, another millimeter closer to the explosion, and he shrugs and says, _Dunno. I’m not sure I can afford it anymore._

While J gapes, Jason pushes past him and into the factory to dump his duffle bag on one of the mismatched sofas in the improvised living area. He sits down beside it, elbows resting moodily on his knees as he glares through a pile of books that J should really get around to reshelving at some point and that certainly didn’t deserve this kind of treatment. Harley is out at work for the next few hours; J wishes heartily that she were here, but he’d feel too guilty taking her away from the people who need her. He’ll have to handle this on his own. 

(Oh, Harley. Harley Harley Harley. His bright, brilliant Harleen Quinzel, saddled with a pun name because her parents thought it was cute, worked her ass off all the way through medical school and sexism and mental-illness stigma of the worst kind just so she could do for other people what had been done for her; who did exactly that during J’s several-month tenure at Arkham following the whole…face thing…who introduced herself in precise, proper tones and then visibly braced for the inevitable joke.

After a moment of careful thought, J said, _Y'know…in the pantomime, the original Harlequin character was the male hero, pursuing the love of the beautiful Columbine._ He grinned too widely, winced, then recovered airily, _I’d much rather tell all my deepest, darkest insecurities to you._

Dr. Quinzel stared at him, then conscientiously dropped her eyes back to his patient file before saying, like she didn’t know quite what to feel about it, _You know, I think that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about my name._

She told him to call her Harleen, to think of her as a friend if he was comfortable with that, and called him Mr. J for lack of any name he felt a closer identification with. It was a little too easy to inadvertently make her retreat into scrupulous propriety, so he did his best not to say anything that would make her feel like she had to withdraw to a safe clinical distance; but then she told him that she was here to help him get better, it wasn’t his job to worry about her, and to say anything he wanted to talk about, so he did his best to obey and tried not to get attached to the little warm glow of self-worth that bubbled up in his chest whenever he managed to make her laugh. A month and a half later, she told him she would be resigning from Arkham the following week. Ethics reasons.

 _But,_ he protested, _Har— Dr. Quinzel — you shouldn’t just throw away your whole life! I’ll be out of here any week now, you said, and you do so much good here—_

Dr. Quinzel waited until he ran out of words, then said in that crisp tone, _Mr. J,_ then smiled. _I am not throwing my life away. With my credentials, I can get very nearly any psychiatric post I wish. We’ve both been as honest in here with each other as my position allows, so I hope I’ve managed to ensure a minimum of the kind of miscommunication that might cause ethical issues. And anyway, if we were to have a relationship, it would be inappropriate to continue holding a job where I’d still be counseling you beyond the scope of our doctor-patient relationship._ She grinned at his expression, cheeks dimpling. _I’ve been thinking of getting into social work. Kids and families, you know? That was my other top choice when Arkham hired me.)_

He _really_ wishes Harley was here.

 _Jaybird,_ the Jester says cautiously, _what happened?_

Jason shrugs again, that same hopeless one-shouldered rise and drop. _We had another fight. The usual. I didn’t back down this time, so he fired me._

The boy is fifteen years old and underneath the anger in his voice is so much pain that he refuses to let himself feel, so much that it hurts to draw breath, suffusing every line of his posture like he’s trying to armour himself in enough sharpness to cut anyone who comes near. The Jester sits down next to him, not too close, and when Jason’s body language doesn’t change he puts a tentative hand on the kid’s shoulder. Jason relaxes marginally under the touch, like he always has once he got used to J’s absentminded tactility, and J feels guilty again for no reason. He’s pretty sure the kid doesn’t do that for anyone but him and Harley. _You can stay here as long as you need,_ he assures Jason, then asks, _Want me to talk to him?_

Jason shakes his head. _Not much point. We’ve already said everything there is to say._

J’s heart breaks. It’s not entirely anyone’s fault, not really, because Bruce has never really known what to do with his own emotions, much less other people’s, and Jason has more than enough emotions for the both of them, and neither of them knows how to deal with hurt feelings except through repression and control. Jason is a difficult kid, _anyone_ would be a difficult kid with that kind of childhood, and J would bet dollars to doughnuts that Bruce felt he was compromising as much as he dared for Jason’s safety and couldn’t understand why Jason wouldn’t accept what he was trying to tell him — and meanwhile Jason would have felt more and more unheard, unfairly restricted, invalidated and patronised. On reflection, it’s not just the Jester that Jason is too similar to.

What a mess. He could _really_ use his wife’s skillset right about now.

Jason is leaning just very slightly into the contact in a way that says he doesn’t realise he’s doing it, so J takes a chance and slides his arm around the kid’s shoulders, giving him something warm and solid to ground himself against. Gradually Jason melts into the touch, and they end up with the Jester’s arms wrapped around him and Jason breathing deep shuddering breaths against his collarbone, not crying, J can’t remember ever seeing Jason cry and as far as he knows the kid doesn’t. J pats him awkwardly and says stupid comforting reassurances, things like _don’t worry_ and _it’s okay, it’ll be alright_ and _you’re okay, there’s nothing wrong with you, no one’s gonna make you leave_ and eventually those shuddering breaths slow and Jason says, muffled, into his shirt, _Any chance you could use a sidekick?_

The Jester can’t say no. He does say, _You know he cares about you, right? He worries about you so much._ He doesn’t use the word _love,_ doesn’t dare; Jason would never accept that, would never let himself believe it from anyone, and J’s never heard him say it to anyone, either. Too many scars.

 _Sure,_ says Jason, and he just sounds exhausted now, wrung out from carrying and releasing more emotion than any person has the strength to hold, much less a lonely teen with PTSD and major trust issues. _He just doesn’t see me as a person._

There’s nothing J can really say in response to that.

(He does, however, treat Bruce coolly and professionally when he sees him next, which is an unmistakable signal that the Bat has made his way neck-deep into the ball pit of rainbow-coloured clown poo. Bruce does talk with the Jester about it, and J answers completely and honestly, hiding nothing except what Jason would want hidden. Bruce accepts this in the critical spirit in which it is meant.)

(There is no Joker to kill Jason in this timeline, so does he die? Perhaps the Jester’s fears come true and he’s hoist on his own petard, burnt up by the same fire that drives him, or perhaps it’s someone else who dies — either way, the first time J attends the funeral of one of their own, Bruce finds him about a hundred feet away under a crabapple tree shading a scattered family plot, just within hearing range of the proceedings but far enough away to keep from obviously compromising the identity of the deceased. J is dressed up in as close as he gets to formal civvies, which in this case means a midnight-purple three-piece suit sharply tailored for a man closer to Bruce’s size and shape than his own, spats, and a wide-brimmed fedora to somewhat hide his unnatural pallor. Harley, who can at least pass unnoticed when she wants to, is perhaps among the mourners around the grave; he would have told her to go, if it were someone she was emotionally attached to. Both she and the deceased deserve that much.

J gives Bruce a nod as he comes over, letting out a long breath as he looks out over the cemetery. After a moment, he comments, _It’s kind of like that Pagliacci story, y'know? When your whole life’s about making other people feel better, there’s not really much room to have your own._ He glances up at Bruce with a subdued smile, which is primarily distinguishable from his typical one by the lack of visible teeth. _Anyway. How are you holding up?_

Bruce raises an eyebrow and gives J one of his Looks.

J punches him in the arm, then shakes out the hand theatrically. _Buddy my pal, I am married to a psychiatrist. Trust me when I say you in no way need to go there and we can stick to the tradition of sublimating our negative emotions into violence and risky behaviours, as is our prerogative as men._

The eyebrow returns to its proper elevation and Bruce looks back out to the gathered mourners, posture changing not a jot. J can sense his relief.)

(J _is_ good at using his feelings to connect with other people, though. It’s probably because unlike Bruce and Harley and the rest of Gotham’s vigilantes, the law never even pretended to be on his side, so he got used to thinking of justice as something you had to make happen yourself, whether or not anyone gets punished. Everyone does the wrong thing sometimes, after all, and what matters is that they _stop_ so it can be made right, not that they hurt for it. That’s why his first instinct is to validate _why_ someone’s doing whatever they’re doing, whether or not he agrees with it. 

The ancient Greeks had this thing, catharsis, that was the purpose of all those tragic plays. Everyone would get together to watch an hour-long portrayal of all the follies of man (and woman, &c.) and take comfort in the fact that they weren’t alone in their mistakes and their struggles, that everyone around them was feeling the same way they were, and they’d go home afterward and be a little more understanding with each other for a while, a little more forgiving of themselves. The Jester once talked Mr. Freeze down that way when Freeze had frozen him to the floor and he couldn’t reach any of his gadgets — just stood and acknowledged his pain, acknowledged the reasons he was doing the things he did, acknowledged that when you’ve been hurt and wronged so badly it’s impossible not to want to _lash out_ and make everyone see what was done to you with no one to care. Freeze had stopped in his tracks, threatened him and his loved ones, ranted about the injustices he’d borne whenever the Jester gave him an opening to…and his expression became more and more confused when J kept agreeing with him, more and more unsettled and lost because he couldn’t imagine anyone being on his side, and by the end of it his face was all tight and creased like he would have been crying if he physically could and when Batman crept up in his blind spot to take his freeze gun (while J tried to communicate solely through eyebrow movements _not to do anything aggressive)_ he just stood there and let it be taken, then slowly crumpled to his knees.

 _Nora,_ he said like the name was being physically dragged out of him, _Nora, I’m so sorry. God, what I’ve done…she would hate me._

Batman hesitated so briefly it would have been unnoticeable to a layman, then laid his free hand on the shoulder of Freeze’s cryosuit and stepped into his range of vision so Freeze could see what he was doing even if he couldn’t feel the contact, and said in his low voice, _Then you’ll have to become the kind of man she can love again, Victor._

 _I can’t,_ said Freeze, shaking his head in desperate denial. _I’ve done too much. She could never forgive me._

 _You can,_ said Batman. _I’ll help you._

 _And me!_ J chimed in, trying to look like the entire lower half of his body wasn’t going somewhat terrifyingly numb.

Batman Looked at him, then back down to Mr. Freeze, and affirmed, _We’ll **all** help you,_ while the Jester beamed anxiously in the background.

It was one of the more nerve-wracking things J has done in his career of incredibly risky moves, and he spent the rest of the day under observation to make sure there wouldn’t be hypothermia damage; he absolutely _never_ plans to have to try that kind of thing on someone like, say, Bane.)

Bruce originally picks up Jason a few months after Dick leaves for college, and the Jester will most certainly never contradict his insistence that it was coincidence and not empty-nest syndrome (aloud, anyway). Batgirl precedes Jason by about a year, and immediately drives the papers and news channels into a frenzy of speculation about the new auburn-haired Bat, where she came from, why she showed up now. Batman vouches for her; Dick gets a little more detailed and says she’s _infuriating — a complete amateur — but all right, I guess._ Whoever she is, she’s not part of the arrangement the Dynamic Duo have together: she doesn’t patrol with them, but appears more opportunistically in response to crimes noteworthy enough to make it into police radio dispatches or the news. J assumes she’s more law-oriented than he is and keeps out of her way, at least until he hears about her teaming up with Catwoman to bag Roland Daggett for museum theft and an attempted frame-up. When J learns the details, he chortles like a loon while Harley grins ear to ear and looks skyward as if thanking providence for the joke.

J likes Batgirl! It’s true that she’s an amateur early on, but everyone has to start somewhere and she’s _sharp_ and puts every lesson into practice as soon as she’s learned it. She also trades puns with him and Harley, so that makes her good in his book. She bonds with Harley in particular, which is probably inevitable for a pair of intimidatingly brilliant and multitalented women, and Harley ends up subtly mothering her and pulling out her family-counselor tricks when Batgirl vents about certain unnamed figures in her life smothering and/or underestimating her.

Batman definitely knows who she is, and J and Harley have vague suspicions, but they courteously avoid looking any further into it until Dick has his falling-out with Bruce and leaves to establish his own brand separate from the Batman-and-Robin duo that’s defined nearly half his life. Batgirl starts showing up more, joining Batman on patrols and at the cave, and by the turn of the season it’s clear that she’s taken Robin’s place as Batman’s primary backup and civilian-reassurer. She also ends up taking over Alfred’s job of remote research and logistical support, to which Alfred professes sincere relief. At some point they tell J and Harley that Batgirl’s true identity is Barbara Gordon, Jim Gordon’s daughter; all Harley says is, _Well, I s’pose it runs in the family,_ and J utterly loses it. Barbara has that strained look where she’s trying to hide supreme amusement at their reactions, so that’s okay.

She forthrightly big-sisters Jason as soon as he’s brought in on the family business, which works out because he reacts to her exactly like an irritated little brother. After Bruce fires him, she comes over to the factory to hang out and talk with him, even if Bruce doesn’t. He tolerates her, acts like he isn’t grateful she’s there, but he doesn’t try to make her leave. After the first attempt, she doesn’t try to convince him to come back.

Your humble author hasn’t read many of the comics and the Tim Drake of the animated series is more than half Jason Todd in backstory and characterisation in any case, so I can’t say much about the other Robins individually except that after already [driving Dick to become Nightwing](https://dcau.fandom.com/wiki/Old_Wounds), Bruce takes Jason leaving even harder than anyone was quite prepared for. The Jester and Harley are perhaps less willing to help support Bruce in this than they usually are, so it’s a clever, driven young photographer who sees his hero becoming impulsive and self-destructive and realises what he must do to fix it. Tim treats Jason coolly when they meet on the job, and Jason makes passive-aggressive or aggressive-aggressive allusions to Batman’s tyrannical tendencies, but when push comes to shove they find they can both appreciate each other’s focus on Solving The Problem by whatever means they have at hand.

(Jason models his new sidekick persona after Puck, perhaps, the perennial Robin Goodfellow, avatar of mischief and harbinger of painful ironies. There has always been an element of Pan in the character of Robin, innocent and Dionysian, revelling as easily in violence as in flight as he subdued criminals with the same boyish exuberance as Peter did the pirates.)

Later, Cass probably takes joy in the Jester and Harley’s body language — so alive, so in love, laughing genuinely even when they’re sad.

Damian probably can’t stand the Jester, but then he can’t stand most people. J doesn’t stop trying to make him laugh. One day, it works. Damian is horrified. J is so, so proud. (Harley brings her family-counseling A-game to interactions with the boy, but even she has trouble making a dent in the Great Wall of Damian’s Judgment at first. She eventually makes progress by gently leading him into considering others’ needs and points of view, which prompts a good deal of troubled self-reflection on Damian’s part…which then inevitably leads to him blaming the “giggling harridan" for trying to turn him against his mother and grandfather, which Harley uses to springboard a discussion that somehow, amazingly, ends in Damian sincerely apologising. Which is probably a miracle of some sort.)

The Jester doesn’t join the initial lineup of the Justice League. In most timelines, the League forms in response to a major world crisis, and in that kind of situation the Jester and his partners are going to be clearing the streets and rescuing trapped or disabled civilians, not getting into the thick of things with the heavy hitters. He’s an acrobat with a terrifyingly creative mastery of props and gadgets, not a superhuman, and moreover he’s a local guy. Gotham is _his_ city, and he knows its streets and rooftops and boltholes and major players as well as he knows his own heartbeat. This is where he can do the most good.

And because he’s just an acrobat with a terrifyingly creative mastery of props and gadgets, whenever he’s needed for something outside his usual purview, he ironically does best in a guerrilla capacity despite the bells and motley. There’s nothing like a decade of experience at having nothing between you and real actual flying bullets except surprise and agility to really hone one’s stealth and ambush skills. Also, he’s very bendy! He’s no Ragdoll, but if you need someone to steal a vital component from a high-security facility, just give him a map and a radio uplink, point him at an air vent, and watch him go.

I’m not going to examine every change that comes of having a friendly clown instead of the Joker in this universe, but I can’t let pass one difference of note. The “World’s Finest" arc, after all, was precipitated by the Joker tracking down a twenty-pound statuette made entirely of kryptonite, stealing it, and selling his services to Lex Luthor against Superman.

Whereas if the Jester tracked the Laughing Dragon statue to an antiques store in Gotham, things would have gone a little differently. He would have paid for the thing, first of all — with Bruce Wayne’s money, admittedly, Harley doesn’t make _that_ much, but J’s entirely certain that Bruce is aware of the checkbook he once pocketed from his desk and trusts him not to use it without good cause. Plus it cuts down on occasionally having to choose between stealing someone’s actual valuables or risking something important falling into dangerous hands.

While Harley goes into the shop to charm the proprietor with a pair of big baby blues and a forged check, the Jester pops over a few blocks to call the Daily Planet via payphone.

 _Hi,_ he tells the receptionist, _uh, what do I do if I have an anonymous tip for Lois Lane?_

The receptionist tells him she’ll transfer him to Ms. Lane’s private line. He taps his pointy-toed shoe restlessly as he waits.

When Ms. Lane picks up, the Jester says, _Yeah, so, I have a question. How would you dispose of twenty pounds of radioactive green rock?_

After a moment, Lois replies, incredulous, _Is this a threat?_

 _Ah,_ says the Jester, _no. Nooo. I can assure you I have only the best of intentions, hence my asking your advice._

 _Because calling with an anonymous tip and then phrasing it like that is actually very ominous,_ Lois points out.

 _Right,_ says the the Jester. _Sorry about that. I didn’t want to assume anything, so._

 _Assume anything?_ J can hear the raised eyebrow.

 _You know,_ says J, _on the outside chance that, say, you didn’t actually want it destroyed because your friend’s heroic persona is a ruse and you’re being coerced into giving him good publicity. I didn’t want to say it aloud._ He probably could have sent a letter instead, but super-sight and X-ray vision are just as much of a hazard in that sense.

 _Huh,_ says Lois. _Usually when we get crank calls, we don’t get them from a real, live crank. I mean, every so often you get a conspiracist who trusts the media enough to come to us, but usually it’s just people who think the fact that they got screwed over means the whole system’s in on it._

 _I did say ‘outside chance’, didn’t I?_ J makes his voice indignant, but he’s not actually all that bothered. He’s a costumed vigilante, certain kinds of consideration are going to sound like paranoia to normals who aren’t used to it. Even if he would have expected better from Superman’s favourite journalist.

 _You’re right,_ admits Lois. _That’s…very considerate. Thank you. I’m fine, though. I’ll…just go check on the answer to your question now. Can you hold?_

A few minutes later, she’s back on the line: _You can dissolve it in acid, such as hydrochloric acid at a concentration of about 30% or higher._

 _Awesome,_ says the Jester. _Thanks. Good luck with your reporting._

They save a sliver, of course, and to prevent it from going astray they give it to Batman for highest-security safekeeping. Just in case.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Feedback and constructive criticism give me the motivation to write more. Even if I don’t respond, I read and appreciate every comment on any of my fics.
> 
> (Constructive criticism includes formatting errors; this was a _big_ chunk of text to go through multiple times for edits and HTML, so I may easily have overlooked something.)
> 
> If you enjoyed this work, please consider taking a look at [my other DC fics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Days/works?fandom_id=390) as well.


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